Ralph Compton Tucker's Reckoning (9781101607770) Read online

  Tucker’s

  Reckoning

  A Ralph Compton Novel

  by

  MATTHEW P. MAYO

  New American Library

  New American Library

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

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  First published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, November 2012

  Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Mayo, Matthew P.

  Tucker’s reckoning: a Ralph Compton novel/by Matthew P. Mayo.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN 978-1-101-60777-0

  I. Compton, Ralph. II. Title.

  PS3613.A963T83 2012

  813'.6—dc23 2012021140

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

  This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.

  True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.

  In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?

  It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.

  It has become a symbol of freedom, when there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives, or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.

  —Ralph Compton

  CHAPTER ONE

  Despite the creeping cold of the autumn afternoon in high country, and the feeling in his gut as if an irate lion cub were trying to claw its way out, Samuel Tucker reckoned that starving to death might not be an altogether unpleasant sensation. Of course, the warm light-headedness he was feeling might also have something to do with the last of the rotgut gargle he’d been nursing since he woke up.

  He regarded the nearly empty bottle in his hand and shrugged. “No matter. Finally get to see you again, Rita, and little Sammy. My sweet girls. . . .”

  Even the horse on which he rode, Gracie, no longer perked her ears when he spoke. At one time a fine mount, she was now more bone than horse. The sorrel mare plodded along the lush valley floor, headed northward along the east bank of a river that, if Tucker had cared any longer about such things, he would know as Oregon’s Rogue River. All he knew was that he’d wandered far north. And he didn’t care.

  His clothes had all but fallen off him, his fawn-colored, tall-crowned hat, a fine gift from Rita, had disappeared one night in an alley beside a gambling parlor in New Mexico. The top half of his once-red long-handles, now pinked with age and begrimed with Lord knows what, and more hole than cloth, served as a shirt of sorts. Ragged rough-weave trousers bearing rents that far south had invited welcoming breezes now ushered in the frigid chill of a coming winter in high country. And on his feet, the spli
t, puckered remnants of boots. These were the clothes Tucker had been wearing the day his Rita and little Samantha had . . .

  At one time, though, Samuel Tucker had cut a fine figure around Tascosa, Texas. With his small but solid ranch, and with a wife and baby daughter, he’d been the envy of many. But that was in the past, before the sickness. . . . Mercy, thought Tucker, two years and I can’t think of it without my throat tightening.

  “At least I don’t have to worry about being robbed,” he said aloud. His laugh came out as a forced, thin sound that shamed him for a flicker of a moment. Then once again he no longer cared.

  The land arched up before him in a gentle rise away from the river. Here and there, trees close by the river for the past half mile had been logged off some years before, leaving a stump field along the banks. Ragged branches long since cleaved from the vanished timber bristled upward among still-green undergrowth seeming to creep toward him. He traveled along the river, and the gradually thickening forest soon gave way to an upsloping greensward just beginning to tinge brown at the tip.

  He was about to pitch the now-empty bottle in the rushing brown flowage off to his left when the crack of a gunshot halted him. It came from somewhere ahead. Even Gracie looked up. Two more shots followed.

  Curiosity overrode his drunken lethargy and the pair, man and horse, roused themselves out of their stupor and loped up the last of the rise. They found themselves fifty yards from an unexpected sight: two men circling one. The man in the center, a wide-shouldered brute wearing a sheepskin coat, sat tall astride a big buckskin. He held in one hand what looked to be a substantial gun, maybe a Colt Navy, but appeared to have trouble bringing it to bear on the two men, who took care to keep their own horses dancing in a circle around the big man. He tried to do the same, tugging feebly at his reins.

  What was wrong with the man? Tucker wondered. Was he drunk? He acted as much. And then Tucker got his answer. The man jigged his horse again, and the big horse tossed its head and stepped hard. Then Tucker saw the red pucker, blackened at the edges. The man had been shot in the back.

  One of the other men shouted, then shot the big man’s hand. It convulsed and the pistol dropped. The shooter’s companion, thin and sporting a dragoon mustache and a flat-crowned black hat with what looked like silver conchos ringing the band, laughed, looking skyward. As he brought his head back down his laughter clipped short. He leveled his pistol on the big man in the sheepskin coat.

  One shot to the gut and the victim hunched as if he were upheaving the last of a long night’s binge. He wavered in the saddle. The man looked so fragile to Tucker. It did not seem possible that this was happening right there before him.

  The first shooter howled this time. Then he rode up close, reached out with his pistol barrel like a poking finger, and pushed the man’s shoulder. That was all it took. The big man dropped like a sack of stones to the grass. The buckskin bolted and the black-hatted man leveled his pistol at it, but the other shouted something, wagged his pistol in a calming motion, and they let the beast run. It thundered off, tail raised and galloping, toward where Tucker had intended to ride. How far was the man’s home place? Was he even from around here?

  With a bloodied hand planted in the grass, the big man forced himself up on one knee. He gripped his gut, his sheepskin coat open, puckered about his gripping hand. From beneath the clawed fingers oozed thick blood that drizzled to the grass. Where did the man get his strength? Didn’t he know that he was as good as dead, but just didn’t yet realize it?

  The man had lost his hat in his fall, and a breeze from the north tumbled it a few strides away. His head was topped with a thick thatch of white hair trimmed close on the sides, but the face beneath was a weathered mask, harder than leather, as if carved from wood. And it was the big man’s face that froze Tucker. The man had been back-shot, gut-shot, and more, but his expression bore unvarnished rage. Bloody spittle stringed from his bottom lip, his eyes squinted up at his attackers, both a-horseback a few feet away, staring down at him.

  Tucker was too far to hear their words, but he heard the jabs and harsh cut of their voices. These were angry men, all three. But a gut feeling told Tucker that the man on the ground had been wronged somehow.

  Surely I should do something, say something, thought Tucker. Then he realized that if he did, he too would die. Gracie was a feeble rack of skin and bone, as was he. His only possession, clutched in his hand, was a green glass whiskey bottle. Empty. He didn’t dare move. Felt sure that if they saw him, he’d be a dead man in short order.

  Isn’t that what you want? he asked himself. Isn’t that what you’ve been doing for more than two years now? Tapering off your days until there is so little left of you that you’ll eventually dry up, become a husk rattling in a winter breeze?

  And yet, as he watched this big man struggle to live, to fight these attackers, darting in and yipping at him, like wild dogs prodding a downed deer, Tucker knew he had to help this man. But how?

  His decision was made for him when the thicker, shorter of the two men leveled his pistol across his other forearm at the big man swaying on his knees. He squinted down the barrel, and touched the trigger. The pistol bucked and the big man jounced again, flopped partly onto his left side, and lay in the grass, hands clutched tight beneath him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tucker watched as the two killers circled the man in opposite directions. He tensed when at the last minute it seemed as if he might be seen. One of the men had a peculiar habit of jerking his head at an odd angle, a nervous condition, no doubt. The smaller man hopped down from his horse, said something to his companion, then rummaged in the big man’s coat. He pulled out what looked like a folded white paper. It looked as though the man was smiling. He stuffed the paper into his own coat, then mounted up.

  Tucker kept silent and unmoving, and the men soon thundered off in the direction the dead man’s horse had traveled. Long minutes passed, and all sign of the riders dissipated into the chilling air, leaving Samuel Tucker shivering atop his horse. He listened for a moment to the soughing of the breeze through the treetops and stared at the back of the big sheepskin coat. Dead for sure, but Tucker didn’t dare move.

  He thought about the man and his killers. They had been the first sign of humans he’d had in several days—how many he did not know. Finally he tapped Gracie with his heels and she walked forward, eager, he figured, to sample the green grass before them.

  A meadow such as this, bound to be a ranch nearby. Maybe they would know who the man was. As he approached the body, Tucker’s shivering increased. He knew it was for more than just the cold creeping in between his thready clothes and the goose-bumped skin beneath. When he was some yards from the body, Tucker reined up and slid off the horse, who grunted and dipped her head to the grass and began nosing and cropping with gusto. He let the hackamore reins trail. He had long ago given up worrying if Gracie would wander off—he fancied she was as tired and as uncaring as he.

  If that man’s coat had been gray, he thought, stepping carefully, shifting his glance up toward the direction ahead where he’d last seen the two riders recede into the landscape, it might well be mistaken for a great rock marring this otherwise cleared meadow. He ventured forward another step, realized he had the bottle clutched tight in his hand, and held on to it. Not much of a weapon, but it would be better than nothing should those shooters decide to double back to admire their handiwork.

  He drew closer, tried to stop the thoughts occurring to him—how, despite the blood and the hole in the back, warm that coat would be. If not for the man’s wide shoulders and obvious girth, Tucker suspected he was of similar height. Any bulk and muscle he had once had—and it had been enough to fill out and keep solid his thick frame—had in the past couple of years of wandering dissipated till he was a tall, gaunt man, unshaven and sunken-eyed. But try as he might he could not think of anything other than that warm co
at now.

  He cut wide around the body and looked down at the man. He saw no breath rise from the mouth, saw no movement of the chest. What he did see was a man lying on his left shoulder, large hands gripping a belly glistening with blood. The shirt over it had once been a checkerboard pattern of white and sky blue checks, but now was a knot of bloody hands and sopping red cloth.

  Tucker turned his back on the direction he’d been so cautious about looking, and knelt before the hunched form. Seeing that big white-haired head, clean-shaven face, a nose that had been broken a time or two, the jutting brow and windburned cheeks—it all reminded him of his father, dead long years ago, and buried by Tucker’s own hand back in Texas. He’d laid him to rest beside the woman he’d pined for all of Samuel’s life, the mother Samuel never knew, lost to them both from a fevered sickness.

  Tucker cut loose any stray thoughts he had for his own safety and decided that since he had watched the man die, the least he could do was figure out who he was, maybe let his kin know, provided there were any. Barring that, he could try for the nearest town. He looked up at Gracie, who had not moved but a step or two as she dined on the toothsome grasses.

  He wasn’t sure he could hoist the man aboard her. But even if he could, he wasn’t so sure the old horse could carry the dead man. Tucker set down the empty bottle and knelt close before the man, his face tightening as he reached for the blood-specked lapels. First things first, he told himself. Have to see if I can find something on him that might identify him. He looked around again, half hoping he’d see the man’s buckskin headed his way. Nothing moved except Gracie’s mouth.

  Tucker looked back to the man, reached to part the coat, and a puffed and bloodied hand, the palm cored and oozing gore, snatched Tucker’s left wrist and held on with a surprising grip.

  Tucker yelped and toppled backward. He landed raggedly, his eyes wide as they met the hard stare of the gut-shot dead man.

  The big hand, though mangled, held him fast. A sound like a sigh came from him. Then a blood bubble rose from his mouth and popped, and he spoke in a voice as strong as his grip, “Tell Emma . . . heart . . .”